


monstro

by BlackJacketsandPens



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-09
Updated: 2014-03-09
Packaged: 2018-01-15 02:39:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1288171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackJacketsandPens/pseuds/BlackJacketsandPens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some headcanon backstory, etc, for The Fear.</p>
            </blockquote>





	monstro

'Blessed by the jungle', his parents had said.

'Child of the rainforest', 'their little forest spirit', ' _selva nascido_ '…hundreds of names, all affectionate. His family loved him, praised him for it, accepted it and more. He was their golden boy, their little hero, and not for one minute did he ever think anything was wrong with what he was.

What he was.

He’d been born with it. Nothing big, nothing terrible, no extra eyes or limbs or horns or a tail or anything like that. Only small things. Pointed ears, sharp canines like an animal’s, uncanny hearing and sight, even in the darkest of nights. Unnatural flexibility and agility, graceful as a jaguar and agile as a monkey, able to climb the smoothest of trees in moments and contort himself in ways that would make even a snake flinch.

And his eyes. Yes, his eyes. Born with eyes the most unnaturally vibrant orange, the color of the sky when the setting sun lights it ablaze, pupils slit like a predator’s.

He’d never seen anything wrong with this. It was who he was, how he was born, and his family did not see it as a curse, but a blessing. They saw him as their son, their little hero.

Not a monster.

No, not a monster. Not when he went alone to battle at last, not when comrades took pause and opponents paled and cried out in surprise. Not when he disappeared into the arms of his mother the forest, one with the spirits of the animals, the plants, the many voices of life in her green womb. Not when he returned from it, and more pauses and stares and wariness were what was given to him. Not even when he was captured, and the first murmurs of that word began to circulate.

‘ _Monstro_ ’. Monster.

No, he only began to think of it when he saw what had been done to him, saw what he had let happen. “Let me fight,” he had said. “Give me a cause and I will fight for you.”

Oh, they gave him one, all right. But with the caveat of those surgeries, the hours of burning agonizing pain, the feeling that his limbs were being ripped apart, turned inside out, torn into pieces and shattered, the feeling of choking and gagging and suffocating on this piece of flesh that was inside your throat inside your mouth everywhere and thick and slimy as it was forced down into you with more pain than you ever believed one person could experience in a lifetime.

The moment when he was left in that disgusting basement, limbs awkward and twisted and longer than they had been, tongue long and hideous, spilling out of his mouth with a forked tip like a snake’s.

That’s when doubt crept in, began to plant its poisonous seeds in his mind, tangling themselves up in his fragile mental state and whispering venom. 

_Monster. **Monster.**  You were always a monster. Not blessed, but cursed. A freak. A mutant.  **Fear.**  You create fear because you are a monster. They may have made you like this, but you didn’t need to be made a monster. Because you were  **born**  one._

At first he watched them come to his cell, his basement corridors. Leaving him opossums, bats, small monkeys, birds. Live food for an animal. Watching him with open, undisguised horror and fear. Nearly running away, slamming the door behind them. After a while he couldn’t bear it, too hurt by their faces, the horror in their eyes to risk the human contact he so needed.

_You **scare**  them. You have  **always**  scared them. You are an animal, a predator. A hunter and a  **killer** like the jaguar, like the anaconda, like the piranha, like the caiman and the armadeira. A monster is a being that causes  **fear,**  a predator strikes terror in the hearts of their prey. That is what you are, always have been. You were made for it,  **born**  for it, and this is just the obvious conclusion. An animal in a cage waiting to be released for the hunt. First the  **body**  and then the  **mind,**  and soon you will be all monster, nothing left of the man. And there is no room for liberty, no room for revolution, no room for justice or equality or causes or happiness or  **anything**  in the heart of a  **monster.**_

And so it was. So he became a monster, ripping apart the prey he was given, blood staining hands and face and what remained of dirty clothing, covered in gore and piss and filth and who knew what else, devoid of speech, of understanding, of humanity. Crouched like a beast, nails sharp as claws, already-preternatural senses honed to a razor’s edge. Nothing left of the boy he once was, the man, the revolutionary and the forest’s child.

He was saved eventually, by a golden-haired angel with the name of an emotion he had enough of to spare. Weeks, months, years later, it would always be the first word of English he ever learned and he would keep it treasured in his heart as such because she was his savior.  _Joy._  Joy, the woman who pulled him out of his cages, who found the human in the animal and brought him back to life. Who gave him a new start, a new name, a new purpose and a new cause, and who led him to meet the one to whom he gave his heart in full, and who he would go on to gladly die for.

But even so, even then, those seeds had been planted and nourished by neglect and watered by darkness and blood and fear. 

Was he a monster? His new family told him no. But still he doubted, still he wondered. His job, his purpose, was to inflict fear, to carry that into the battlefield as his weapon and his strength, but did that make him more human, or less than? This thing that he was, was it truly capable of returning to the humanity he’d lost, or did he even have that humanity to begin with? 

_It scared him._

It was almost funny, that the one who spread fear with a smile on his face would be at his core terrified of his own self, his own skills and weapons, the very thing that made him what he was. But perhaps that made him the best qualified to handle it, because how else better to understand a monster than by fearing it? He was fear and he was afraid. How appropriate.

A man had said, he’d heard, that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

He agreed.


End file.
